Author. Strength Coach, Personal Trainer
Houston, TX
Joined September 2021
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If this is you, Pre-Exhaustion is a very legitimate tactic. Starting your lower body workouts with 2-3 hard sets of leg extensions and leg curls and THEN squatting and hip hinging later in the workout will still allow you to push those movements hard but you’ll need far less weight to approach failure within the same rep range. Have done this for a good long while and joints feel better and leg size is just as good if not better. Not a great strategy for strength but good for size. Don’t even have to do it every workout if you still wanna retain top end strength but doing it for even 25-50% of leg workouts can work for longevity.
Selection bias is a funny thing:
People who hire trainers often cite “safety” as a primary motivation = not risk takers = Less likely to leverage debt.
People who wind up in trouble with the feds = risk takers = more likely to leverage debt.
Big benefit of being a personal trainer for 20+ years is you mainly deal with very high net worth people. Not necessarily Bezos money but A LOT of people who will very comfortably retire at a youngish age with plenty of money to do what they want when they want, not stress over bills, and leave a pile for their kids.
My observations over 20+ years of how 99% made their money.
1 - regular / automatic investments into index funds and/or reliable dividend stocks over long periods of time. Haven’t had a single day trader come through.
2 - selling a business. Usually the highest net worth clients ran a business for 20-40 years and then sold it for a fortune
3 - modest real estate investments. Meaning they might own 1-5 single family homes they paid cash for or a patch of land they later sell. Never had anyone come through whose primary investment strategy was buying and selling highly leveraged real estate portfolios .
4 - home is always paid for. Very few carry a mortgage
5 - high income. No way around this one. Gotta make enough thru your business or W2 to sock enough away each month and not get sucked into trying to borrow your way into wealth.
My observations
Biggest mistake a lot of modern powerlifting coaches make is failing to understand the effects of higher intensity work across different client populations.
You cannot train light weight masters females with the same programming you use for heavy weight younger men.
The lightweight / masters / female REQUIRES frequent high intensity lifting. Basically weekly exposure to 90-95% work to build and maintain peak strength. Without it they will often go backwards or stagnate.
The heavyweight / open class / young male will OVERTRAIN with that same frequency of 90% plus lifting.
A 90-95% single is fundamentally a different event for these two populations.
1. What are the athlete’s needs?
2. What are they already doing a lot of elsewhere?
3. What are they not doing elsewhere?
4. What’s their realistic weekly schedule with me?
These are the first “big 4” questions I address when working with youth athletes.
Training actual athletes in the real world is very different than writing out a generic program that occurs in a vacuum.
I can write out a generic 3-4 day per week program for a baseball player.
But that’s always going to look different than the ACTUAL program I conduct with the individual in front of me.
IMO most youth athletes are spending too much time practicing and playing the sport and neglecting actual physical development.
As a result - most athletes have a big deficit in foundational size and strength.
As a result of THAT…….you can generally not distinguish the type of athlete I’m training by looking at their program.
It’s all quite similar
Minor achiness / stiffness in low back = warm up well, squat as normal
Medium achiness / stiffness / pain = warm up well, train as normal but maybe squat 5-10% lighter
Legitimate back pain = warm up well, squat very light for higher reps
Actual injured lower back = pick lower body exercises you can do and train around it
Paralyzed from waist down = focus on upper body
The answer is never to not train
A great hack as a lifter is the ability to ignore occasional minor aches and pains and lift through them, instead of hyper fixing on them and allowing them to consume your trianing and life.
Back a little bothersome? squat anyway
shoulder feeling a little weird? press anyway
"Good things happen when you stop giving a shit about your back pain"
*not medical advice
If your form and/or range of motion are a constant variable, then there aren’t any programming hacks that are going to fix your training.
All programming rests on the assumption that the execution of the exercises you do are the same week to week.
Squatting 225x5 to depth and squatting 245x5 two inches high is not a strength increase and no progress has been made.
Andy Baker retweeted
Very common. That 500 lb low bar strength will pull that high bar squat up pretty quick. So it’ll be hard at first, then get pretty easy for a while, then get hard again. That second stretch of “hard” is where all the gains will be made.
ie you’ll go from 185 to like 275 or even 315 pretty quick. That may not move the needle much. But that journey from 315 to 365/405 definitely will
Choosing Supplemental Lifts for Strength Athletes….
(Defining supplementals as barbell based / variations of main lifts)
Choose exercises where you are weaker and even substantially weaker than your main lift.
315 Benchers will move their grip in 1”, proceed to Bench 305 and call it a close grip bench.
No. Move grip in 1-2 fist widths, not 1-2 inches.
You’ll get more out of the 225 actual close grip bench than you will out of the 305 marginally closer grip.
Turn that 225 close grip into 250 and then 275 and your regular bench will explode.
Apply to all supplementals for your squat, bench, deadlifts instead of cherry picking movements that you’re already strong in.
Congrats to my client Janice Woerner for taking the Silver Medal at the IPF Worlds yesterday in Las Vegas.
There were some real obstacles in our prep for this one but she just kept showing up and putting in the work.
And she’s one of those competitors that has another gear for game day. No matter how prep went, she can always turn it up a notch when it counts!
Most people trying to do full body training programs for hypertrophy usually make three big mistakes that cause them to burn out quickly
#1: They try and train EVERYTHING hard at every session. Unless you’re a total novice you simply cannot maximally train Quads, Chest, Back, Shoulders, Hamstrings, Arms, Calves, Abs, etc at every session.
Full Body doesn’t necessarily mean “every muscle group”.
Sessions should generally have an “emphasis” and then rely on the overlap effect of your compounds to give stimulus to muscles that are not trained directly.
#2: Too many exercises / Too many compounds.
Good general rule:
maximum 6 exercises per session.
3 higher stress compounds, 3 isolation type exercises.
Don’t try and Squat, Deadlift, Bench, Row, Overhead Press, Chin Up 3 times per week with intensity. 2-3 of those at most, fill in the rest with lower stress movements
#3: Too many sets per exercise. I definitely agree with what @DeanTTraining is always ranting about….
Most of the time 2 full out work sets is best.
Sometimes 3 worksets
Sometimes just 1 workset
But mostly 2 worksets
If you feel like you always need 3,4,5 sets per exercise - address execution and effort level.
Also be smart with exercise selection and monitor recovery patterns.
If you go crazy on stiff leg deadlifts on Wednesday, and you’re doing quads on Friday……be careful of the squat pattern you choose. Your low back will be fatigued still.
Something like Hacks or Leg Press with low back support is a good choice. Be flexible with exercise selection based on recovery patterns.
Not standardizing your technique and range of motion is one of the big reasons people don’t progress. Not just because shitty reps are less effective - but you can’t program accurately when technique and range of motion are a variable.
Squatting 5 reps to depth and 3 high and calling it a set of 8 is a mistake and a programming nightmare. 5 reps to depth and 3 high is a set of 5, not a set of 8.
This is an area where you should let your OCD and neuroticism run free.
If you hold yourself to this standard eventually you’ll just stop doing shitty reps and everything will improve.
One of the best things you can do for long term training results:
STANDARDIZE YOUR TECHNIQUE
Get strict, and once your technique breaks, you end the set.
This makes tracking progress and keeping injury risk minimal EASY
NO SLOPPY REPS
Yea, there's use for cheat reps and a little Body-English to intensify, but it usually is just for fun and motivation than effectiveness
So many issues that are assigned to a “weak muscle group” or lack of positional strength are just poor technique.
Client was locking out his deadlifts very softly today.
A lot of coaches would say “weak glutes” “weak erectors” “do more rack pulls”
Reality is…..he was starting every rep with weight ever so slightly shifted forward to the front of his feet.
This will result in weak incomplete lockouts nearly 100% of the time.
I could give him a bunch of rack pulls or I could just shift him back about a half inch to his mid foot.
Easy call.
One of my favorite combos for triceps is to do a quality extension based movement, followed by a close grip floor press.
Not super sets. Just 2-3 sets of extensions to failure, then 1-2 sets of close grips.
The floor press is slightly more tricep dominant than a regular close grip bench as there is just a little less pec involvement out of the bottom.
Benefit of doing them on the smith is you can take a narrower grip than with a barbell and not break your wrists.
Don’t tuck your elbows to the side. Let them flare. It will give you a more acute angle at the elbow than if you tuck. As acute an elbow angle as possible without breaking your wrists is the idea here.
For fucks sake…….Ive been on 4 day benders of nothing but Busch Light and George Dickel and was just fine.
You could survive on coffee for weeks.
Optimal for training and health - obviously not but don’t be such a pussy.
Probably oscillating between killing people so I can take their shit, and trying to avoid being killed by people who want to take my shit.
315 for 5s today on Paused Front Squats. Felt sluggish today after nearly a week off.
Few days off down in South Texas at hunting camp with too much booze and shitty eating had me feeling my age today.
But got a few limits of dove so all good.
This is how you dial in the right volume by the way.
It’s impossible to know the EXACT amount of volume you need for every muscle group / lift and it’s probably a moving target anyways.
But if your lifts are increasing somewhat steadily then you can be pretty confident you’re in the ballpark of correct.
If your lifts are not progressing at least monthly then it’s quite possible that volume is off.
Although there are other factors that could be influencing that besides volume, but it’s something to consider
Got a house at 3%. Paid it off in my mid 30s. Dumb, I know.
Except for in 2020 when a weird Chinese virus hit and my business (a gym) was forcibly closed by the state and even after re-opening a couple months later business was pretty shitty.
I kinda liked not having a mortgage during that rough period.
Since paying off the house it’s been nice having a lot of freed up cash to do cool things with -
Pay cash for a backyard pool
Buy a small ranch
Pay cash for my cars
All things that would have been harder or impossible with the mortgage payment every month.
Highly recommend.
